Beauty In The Line Of Duty Powerful Images Tell Story

September 13, 2009|By Mark St. John Erickson, merickson@dailypress.com 247-4783

Long before Edward M. Condra III became a combat Marine, he was a second-grade kid who loved to draw and tell stories.

So passionately did he care about the characters and scenes that flowed from the tip of his pencil that - within a few years of completing his first simple cartoons - he was creating sophisticated narrative views of Western landscapes filled with cowboys, Indians and horses.

All through high school Condra made art, too, pursuing it with the same exuberance that made him a star in track, baseball and football. At the University of New Mexico, where he won a scholarship to play quarterback, he switched just as seamlessly between the gridiron and his studio art classes.

No wonder then that - as a Marine engineer laying out a hotly fought-over airfield in South Vietnam - Condra reached for his pen in what had become a lifelong habit.

Working sometimes in his personal sketchbook - and sometimes in his surveyor's notes - he recorded what he saw with hundreds of mostly quick and spontaneous drawings. And when he returned home, those pioneering images became the first works of combat art acquired by the Marine Corps during the Vietnam War.

Some 40 years later, two of the Smithfield man's pictures can be seen in "In the Line of Duty: The Art of America's Armed Forces," a show of 160 works at the Peninsula Fine Arts Center.

His large study of two Marines kneeling "In the Bush: Chu Lai, 1965, South Vietnam" is still so powerful and graphic that curator Michael Preble chose it to open the exhibit.

"All I ever wanted to be was an artist - an illustrator, really. I liked making images and telling stories," Condra says.

"That stuck - even after I became a Marine."

A 28-year veteran of the Corps, the retired colonel will join three other Marine combat artists at Pfac Tuesday night for a free "Meet the Artists" question-and-answer session.

Unlike the artists in the other military branches, all four men served their tours of duty in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan as Marines first and artists second, giving their work a first-hand, real-world authenticity that can't be questioned.

"For us, first and foremost, we look for excellence in the Corps, then excellence as artists," says Joan Thomas, curator of the Corps' collection.

"So our artists have a real and immediate connection to the experiences they're describing in their pictures. They're Marines telling the story of Marines."

Such veteran company may have been the last thing Condra's father expected to see as his athletically gifted, artistically inclined son grew into manhood.

Edward M. Condra Jr. was a Naval Academy football star and a decorated naval aviator. His family included an old horse soldier from the Indian Wars as well as another naval officer who went down with his ship.

"He knew nothing about art. He didn't understand it, and - in the end, I think he felt sorry for me," the artist says. "I can just imagine him worrying - 'Poor Ed! He's never going to make it.'"

The family's hopes plummeted further when the young Condra gave up football and left for the Art Center School in California. They dipped still more when - faced with being drafted - the art student shed his Marine Reserve status and signed up for active duty.

Despite qualifying for naval aviator's school in basic training, Condra chose the much shorter commitment of becoming a private in a rifle platoon.

"People died for aviator's school. But I thought - 'I can't do this,'" he recalls. "It was just too long."

Two years later - after a glowing record on several Marine baseball teams -Condra entered the Philadelphia College of Art on the G.I. Bill. Though his days there still rank among the best of his life, he began doubting his prospective career in advertising art and illustration after seeing several previous graduates burn out in similar jobs.

After his own graduation, Condra decided to return to the Marines - in no small measure because of the order and discipline as well as the chance to travel. But when his drill instructor began praising him after a perfect inspection at Officer's Candidate School, he realized that his interest in art would always make him different.

"He asked, 'Where'd you go to school? The Naval Academy? West Point?' And when I said, 'No, sir. The Philadelphia College of Art,' I could see his eyeballs grow," Condra recalls.

"It was a little strange and awkward. But when a door in life opens, you have to jump - even if you don't know how you're going to end up."

Five years afterward, Condra was already standing on the beach when his Marine amphibious force landed at Chu Lai. He began drawing virtually from the get-go, recording such everyday sights as the airfield's tent city and neighborhood kids in addition to night-time fire fights and fellow Marines slogging calf-deep through rice paddies.